Did You Know? Taiwan Turned a Dying Coal Town Into a Cat Village

Ride the Pingxi Line out of Ruifang and you will pass a station where, more often than not, a tabby is asleep on the platform bench. This is Houtong (猴硐) — and the fact that anyone gets off here at all is one of the more charming accidents in modern Taiwanese history.

First, the coal

Houtong was not built for tourists. It was built for coal. From the 1920s through the post-war decades, the Ruisan mining operation made this narrow river valley one of the most productive coal towns on the island, and the village that grew around it housed thousands of miners and their families. The stone coal-preparation plant still stands above the tracks, a huge grey hulk slowly being reclaimed by vines.

Then the coal ran out. Taiwan’s mining industry wound down through the 1980s, Houtong’s pits closed around 1990, and the people left. A town of several thousand shrank to a few hundred residents, most of them elderly. By the early 2000s it was the kind of place the express trains simply passed through.

Then, the cats

What the miners left behind, the cats stayed for. Dozens of strays had settled among the empty houses, and a handful of residents quietly fed them. In 2008 a local cat lover began photographing them and posting the pictures online — and Taiwan’s internet, being Taiwan’s internet, fell completely in love.

Volunteers arrived to help with feeding, vaccinations and neutering. The village leaned in. Cat-shaped signage went up, cafés opened in old miners’ houses, and in 2013 Houtong got something no other rail stop in Taiwan has: a dedicated pedestrian bridge over the tracks, built with cat walkways and cubby holes inside it. That same year CNN Travel named Houtong one of the six best places in the world for cat lovers. The strays had done what the coal could not — brought the town back.

What to know before you go

Roughly a hundred cats live there now, and they are residents rather than attractions: don’t pick them up, don’t feed them human snacks, and use the cat food sold by the village if you want to be useful. It’s about a 90-minute trip from Taipei Main Station via Ruifang, and it pairs beautifully with the rest of the Pingxi Line — Shifen Waterfall is a few stops further up the same track. Weekday mornings are the quiet ones, and the cats know it.

The takeaway: Taiwan has a real talent for this — taking something industrial and finished and letting a community turn it into something people actually love. Houtong just happens to be the version with whiskers.

If Houtong is your kind of place, it’s probably no surprise that our Boba Tea Cat tee is one of the hardest-working designs in the shop. Planning a trip around it? Our guide to things to do in Taipei has the day-trip logistics.